


Janus: An Oral History of Sunrises and Sunsets

by momebie (katilara)



Series: Boys in Black and Blue [4]
Category: Batman (Comics), Batman (Movies - Nolan), Dark Knight Rises (2012)
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-19
Updated: 2013-11-19
Packaged: 2018-01-02 01:22:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1050849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katilara/pseuds/momebie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And if scales had meaning, and if John at rest was a 1 and Dick at rest was a 3, then simple subtraction left him with a 2 and a satisfied sigh as Dick ran his hands down John’s thighs and lightly massaged the muscles tightening there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Janus: An Oral History of Sunrises and Sunsets

**Author's Note:**

  * For [anachronistique (metonymy)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/metonymy/gifts).



> This is merely the recounting of a discovery. A response to Anachronistique for the Kinsey Scale meme, in which she asked for me to relate the relative ratings of the Batfamily. I got to John Blake and ended up with something that was more than an answer, but less than an actual fic. So I've cleaned it up to store it here with the rest of our shared universe.

When John Blake first saw Dick Grayson he didn’t know the young man’s name. He was just another nervous rookie, fresh out of the academy, who had shown up early for his first shift on the beat. The young man was puttering nervously around in the break room and trying to figure out the coffee machine, running his hands through his blue-black hair and muttering to himself. John wasn’t busy, but he didn’t stop to help him. Gotham was a tough city. It lost half of its rookie cops to death or resignation in the first year. There was no benefit to wasting his breath on someone he’d never really have a chance to know. 

He merely continued on to the records retention room, tried to push his mind forward, but it kept looping back. 

. . . 

John liked watching people and cataloging them. It was a game he played with himself when his mind was otherwise unoccupied. A game he’d started some twenty years ago on his first night in his first boys home. He would supply a back story for the adults whose care he’d found himself in, for other quiet children who sat in the backs of classrooms, for strangers on the street. Once he’d done the work he would shunt the story off to the back of his brain somewhere where he could access it later if he needed to. He didn’t usually need to. 

Eventually, John learned Dick’s name because Dick worked hard to make his name known. He survived the first year. He followed leads doggedly. He wasn’t afraid of corrupt cops or gangsters with guns. He was foolish and brave in the way only the young could be. It was breathtaking to behold. After a while, Dick’s file earned itself a place close to the front of John’s mind for quick access. It was as well-worn as if it had been a physical file, because of how often it was amended. 

John had still not spoken to the young man. He hadn’t had real cause to. They’d never worked together. They didn’t share acquaintances. And there was something in John’s gut that made him nervous when he thought about getting to know Dick. It warned him away. Because Dick Grayson shone bright. 

His orbit seemed to have a deep gravity. Those who entered that orbit were lost to it. He treated people with kindness and respect, even those who others would think didn’t deserve it. Even when he fought with people John could tell it wasn’t out of ire, but optimism. How dare those around him act in a way unbecoming of an officer? How dare those around him act in a way unbecoming of themselves? Not everyone was his friend, but everyone was equally as trapped by his presence. He was everything John had ever wanted to be.

. . . 

The last non-informed note John had on Dick was from the night the men who’d been trapped underground came pouring out of the blown tunnel. The Batman had walked away and John had turned back, inspecting faces and looking for Ross. Dick came staggering out of the rubble, bearing the brunt of a man twice his size and near twice his age. The man had a splint on his right leg and Dick was bandaged at the thigh. There was a fair amount of blood on the bandage that looked fresh. Each step must have been excruciating, but he didn’t waiver under the weight. Both of the men were laughing. Not in the closed off ironic way of those around them, through grimaces and strained acquaintance, but actually laughing, ecstatic to be back above ground and turning gallows humour into living humour. 

In a thousand shocked, haggard, dirty faces, two stood out and one eclipsed them all. John noticed something then, that had been lost to him while he’d busied himself with being the hidden dagger for both the Batman and Gordon. Seeing that look on Dick’s face steadied him. He hadn’t even noticed he’d been vibrating off kilter for the last several months. He had never spoken to the young man and here was the unmistakable feeling that he would have drifted untethered not knowing what had become of him. 

. . . 

Then John’s life changed. Without looking, he dove forcefully into the darkness to keep it at bay, and in doing so he lost sight of that particular star. The GCPD worked at odds with him, resenting the statue of the Batman even though he’d saved them all. They resented masks the way he once had. John worked hard to make it so that the mask was the only thing left of him. All of his former comrades blended together into a field of blue which he tried his damnedest not to trespass on. 

He met Barbara Gordon purely by chance, and he fell in love with her in spite of trying to stamp out the parts of him that were malleable. She gave him the same feeling of stability that Dick’s outer orbit presence once had, with all of the added benefit of being more than willing to see to him personally once he let her in. She wanted to know him. She asked to know him. She built herself into his life until he had to tell her everything. 

The night he told her about being the vigilante she pulled his head into her lap and ran her fingers repetitively through his hair. When he ran out of words she talked about how lonely that must be and how she was there to be whatever he needed. John finally understood why Dick and his rescued man had been smiling in the dark on that grimly victorious night. It wasn’t any port in a storm. It was the first mate being willing to wade into the storm with you. 

. . . 

When he finally met Dick it had been at Barbara’s behest. She had a friend, she’d said. A young man whose singular focus was protecting those who needed protecting. It was a young man who would never ask for help, but who needed it. John hadn’t been expecting to see Dick, but when it turned out to be him, when Dick looked up at him and held out his hand and said, _thank you, I know you have more important things to do_ , John balked. There, under Dick’s gaze, staring straight into the sun, he couldn’t think of a single thing that would have been more important than this moment. He couldn’t believe he’d waited this long. 

For the last two years, John Blake had been building a complete picture of Dick Grayson in his head, and now he knew that Dick had been doing the same thing. In Dick’s mind, John Blake towered. He was a hero of the occupation. He was Gordon’s personal hero, the one that was still living, anyway. John Blake was everything Dick Grayson wanted to be and in knowing that John realized how unfair it was to lay that at someone’s feet. He didn’t tell Dick he felt the same. 

As Dick fell into the rhythm of their lives, John revisited his files. Nothing about the facticity of Dick Grayson contradicted the version of him John had created. Even his anger merely augmented the man that he was, because it was only ever petty on rare occasions. For the most part it flared when the people he loved were threatened. On the day John realized he was one of those people it felt like a boot to the gut. The purple bruise from that blow flourished deep in the tissue over his left rib cage. 

John was not prepared for love, not even Barbara’s. He buried it in work and obsession and sex, as he always had. He brought the both of them along for the ride. 

. . . 

When his fitful energy threatened to overtake him John went to Barbara to talk about Dick. It was to ask for permission as much as it was to try and figure out what was happening inside of him. Not that he realized that until she pointed it out, and then granted it. 

She told him not to think about it and not to worry. She told him that they both loved him. 

He asked if it would complicate their lives. 

She told him their lives were as complicated as it was possible to get. That even though he’d tried to have the mask obliterate the rest of him it didn’t work that way. That it was only their mutual respect and trust that kept them sane and working together seamlessly as a team of three. She told him that just because she and Dick hadn’t been able to work it out between them in the past didn’t mean they didn’t have a common cause in him. She told him they were willing to share.

She told him not to label it. She told him Dick would be amenable. She told him she would make herself scarce for the evening, and she kissed him hard on the mouth and soft on the forehead. 

He told her he loved her, said it out loud for the first time, and buried his face in her neck, breathing in the scent and strength of her. 

. . . 

Because their lives were complicated John didn’t get to talk to Dick like normal people would have. He didn’t get to nervously take him out for a beer, or wipe his hands over his jeans in a coffee shop as the nosy baristas looked on. He didn’t get to ambush Dick in the stairwell of his apartment at two am after a long night out. The lives they’d chosen were never going to be allowed the beats and milestones that other people looked for. 

That night a convict escaped from Arkham. A frightened teenager robbed a young couple at gunpoint. Some new criminal, looking to make a name for himself, left the three of them a riddle scrawled on the side of an apartment building in the Narrows. It was early the next morning by the time they were alone in the cave, preparing their supplies for the next night and winding down. John just happened to glance up from the grappling hook gun he was cleaning and look across the cave at the exact moment when Dick pushed himself out from under the pod and sat up. Dick rocked back and forth, thrumming with excess energy as he always was, and wiped the oil off his cheek. He noticed John noticing him, and he smiled. 

John stood up, asked him if he wanted anything to drink. Dick leaned back on his elbows and made a comment about John being a tepid glass of water. It was an invitation couched in deflected want. John was around the table and on his knees before he could think of a reply. He ended up not saying anything at all. Not with his words anyway. But he begged with his hands and pleaded with his lips and asserted himself with his teeth. It wasn’t until after, when they were both lying on their backs and Dick was laughing over how every muscle in his body was sore he was and how he was never going to get a good night’s sleep again, that John truly looked through the file he kept on himself. 

What was he doing here? What was he full stop? The way he felt about both Barbara and Dick redefined what he’d known about attraction. And if scales had meaning, and if John at rest was a 1 and Dick at rest was a 3, then simple subtraction left him with a 2 and a satisfied sigh as Dick ran his hands down John’s thighs and lightly massaged the muscles tightening there. 

At 6AM John was standing at the edge of the cave, just outside of the waterfall’s spray and hidden from the forest surrounding it by the rock formations at its mouth. They watched the rising sun chase the grey of that long night across the sky. Dick came up from behind him, barefoot and wearing only his jeans, and pressed a cup of coffee into John’s hand. John looked down at it through heavy eyelids and laughed. 

Dick asked him what was funny and John told him about the time he’d first spotted him as a rookie, not sure where to place strange foil packets. John told Dick that he’d grown into a capable man, a brave and strong and passionate man, which John never could have hoped to guess. Dick was taken back a little, he shook his head but he didn’t argue. John told him that if the Graysons had still been alive they’d be proud of him. 

Dick asked John what he thought the Blakes would feel about him. 

John took a swig of the coffee and let it scald his tongue, figuring that the night behind him hadn’t been a night for caution, so why start now? He would leave that until later, when he passed out cold in his bed desperately grasping at restorative sleep. Then he told Dick he didn’t know. He didn’t know who they had been. He didn’t know who he was anymore. 

Dick placed his hand on John’s cheek. He teased John by telling him that liking men didn’t make him fundamentally different, purposefully misreading the meaning of the statement. 

_Man_ , John replied. _One man_. He let Dick pull him into a kiss. He wanted to be able to catalogue every part of him that neatly fell into place in Dick’s gravity. John didn’t close his eyes. He didn’t need to, because behind Dick the red rising sun was blinding.


End file.
